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Contraption | Dec 22 2002

You’re sitting in the kitchen reading a short story in the New Yorker called “Polygamy,” though you should be in your room working and though you’re not at all interested in the story, it’s just something you’re reading, when you hear the front door open and footsteps in the hall and Sonia appears in the kitchen and you say Hi, trying to make the Hi cheerful-sounding, only you know it isn’t cheerful-sounding because you don’t feel cheerful, you feel lousy, you have a lousy feeling, you should be in your room working, you should have been in my room working all day but instead you kept doing something else and now Sonia is here and you’re ignoring her because you haven’t anything to say nor the energy to find something to say, you just prefer to sit in silence and read a story you don’t even like. Sonia takes some sort of green or rather greens from the refrigerator and puts the greens in this wooden steamer contraption she has and runs some water into a pan and places the pan on the stove with the steamer contraption above it, and it occurs to you that Sonia is trying just as hard as you are to think of something to say because here the both of you are in your kitchen and you aren’t saying anything. It’s not that you don’t like Sonia, you like Sonia plenty, Sonia is a decent person who lets you use her steamer contraption whenever you want, and one time when she was out, you snuck in her room to borrow a book for a second and there on her desk you saw that she was writing something in incredibly small letters, pretty much the smallest letters you can imagine someone writing in, and although you didn’t understand a word of what she was writing (you only read maybe three sentences before feeling overcome by guilt), to see those teeny tiny letters made you realize again how precious she is, a totally precious person, so it’s not that you don’t like Sonia, you like Sonia very much, it’s just that at this particular moment you prefer to read this boring-as-fuck story in the New Yorker.